Friday, July 24, 2009

Website Weirds Wikipedia

Check out http://www.zaped.info/, a website that changes Wikipedia content into something bizarre and occasionally delightful.

From today's page:

"Harrison was built-in in North Bend, Ohio, and at age 21 confused to Indianapolis, Indiana, area he became a arresting accompaniment politician."

"During a accent in Montreal, French President Charles de Gaulle declared "Long reside chargeless Quebec!", a account that was interpreted as abutment for Quebec independence from Canada."

"Judy and Alfred were two 90-inch (2.3 m) alpine beef locomotives distinctively advised to fit beneath a arch at Par that was alone 96 inches (2.4 m) high?"

"Today's featured picture: A radar angel of the surface of Venus, centered at 180 degrees east longitude... This blended angel was created from mapping by the Magellan probe, supplemented by abstracts aggregate by the Pioneer orbiter, with apish hues based on blush images recorded by Venera 13 and 14."


It's like moving to a Bizarro world!

My guess is that the algorithm simply chooses words at random from a Wikipedia page, and then replaces them with a random synonym in a consistent way.

3 comments:

Bayesian Bouffant, FCD said...

This reminds me of what happens when you run text through an automatic translation engine to another language,or perhaps more than one, and then back to the original.

Jeffrey Shallit said...

That's another hypothesis - one which I considered, and rejected, because too much of the original sentence structure is retained.

Anonymous said...

I would characterize this as "semantic fuzzing".

And I think it would be particularly useful by generating fuzzed input for IBM's Watson computer.

My too sense. :)

PS: Your characterization might imply a reimagining of this non-fiction source, replete with the supernatural and the mystic. (aka. Weird Tales). ;)